The pandemic was useful for social science, but how useful was social science for the pandemic?
A look at selective work in political science and economics on:
Which studies stand out? Where could we have done better?
Rapid responses, broad responses
“Staying in lane” issues fairly well negotiated
Bosancianu et al 2023: lots of theory
Capacity arguments mixed: capacity early on, trust later on
Not much traction from political variables
Trust and inequality stand out
Expert predictions (generally very diverse) and implied updating
Over 100 entries across challenges: Golden, Slough, and Zhai (2023)
Better than chance but only in the tails
Trust and inequality again
Did social science effectively help track the situation?
Sierra Leone dashboard making use of existing sample and team (esp Voors and Mereggi in country): resources
Drawn on by MoF
Similar dashboards in Uganda and elsewhere
Broad willingness to use vaccines. Solı́s Arce et al. (2021)
Many observational papers identifying who takes what kind of action
Are social science contributions helpful for formulating policy?
Incentives to take up vaccine, Klüver et al. (2021)
Attitudes to restrictions (Germany), Hartmann et al (2023)
Broad non-strategic support for vaccine sharing (Germany), Geissler et al. (2022)
Mixed messages on messaging: Good new Dai et al. (2021)
but failure to replicate (Rabb et al. 2022)
Regret lotteries: positive news at first, but no replication Milkman et al. (2022)
Perhaps the largest masking study was done by economists (Abaluck et al. 2022; Jefferson et al. 2023); WHO change in policy
Key study of vaccine delivery Mobarak et al. (2022)
Taking costing seriously
but
Social science methods performing well (theory contributions less obvious)
Striking agility of some (often US based) social science researchers: access to data, willing to move quickly at scale, “shoe leather” research.
Some points of intersection some points of tension seen in lane crossings
Null interpretations, experimental design, theory
Social costs
Huge costs from policies: Egger et al. (2021)